Services

•    Information Architecture
  •    What is an information architect?
  •    How Wide is the Sea? Information Architects and SEO
  •    Information Architecture Articles
  •    Doors and Windows
•    Web Content Writing
•    Web Site Design
  •    Louisiana Web Design
  •    Louisiana Web Site Design
•    Category Management
  •    Keeping the previous structure intact
  •    Virtual Categories
  •    SEO+Categories
  •    One Single Irreducible Attribute
•    Search Engine Optimization
  •    What is SEO? (Search Engine Optimization)
  •    Choose a domain name
  •    Choosing Keywords
  •    Internal Link Structure
  •    SEO Using CSS
  •    URLs: Cleanliness is next to Google-iness.
  •    SEO: Science or Alchemy?
  •    Ascending the Pyramid: Building a successful SEO campaign
  •    Louisiana Web Promotion
•    Local Navigation
  •    Hide and Seek - The dilemma of dynamic content, load time and search engines.
•    Case Studies
  •    Antique China Website
•    Links/Resources

InformationArchiTECH Archives - 7/2005

The articles listed here cover a wide range of topics related to information architecture, ranging from specific issues such as search engine optimization, category management and site search technology, to broader issues such as the the philosophy and ethics of the information architect. Please check back often as these pages are frequently updated.

If you have a business, or THINK you have one, it can be more difficult than you think to determine the kind of category structure makes the most sense. The following are a few steps you should follow, or questions you should ask, in the consideration of this issue:

1> Before anything else, you should decide what category you fit within. If you expect search engine users to find you among the millions of results available to them, you must clearly define exactly what distinguishes you from the rest. What do you do, and what do you not do? Of the companies that do what you do, what makes you the best?

2> You should next consider the user experience upon arriving at your site. Categories are natural, but they are not static. What does this mean? Any example will suffice. Let us consider the beer in your refrigerator. Is it imported or domestic? Is it a stout, an ale or a lager? Does it come in 12 or 16 oz containers? The answers to these questions describe the attributes of your beer, and each of could be used to create a category structure, should you desire. But any category structure should be based upon one single irreducible attribute.

The articles included in this section describe what is meant by the term "information architecture," in order to help business owners and organization heads best determine whether such a service is needed given their current context.

Information architecture is a word with many meanings, depending upon whom you ask. Informationarchitech describes information architecture in the following way:

 Information architecture is the art and science of building virtual structures for a new or existing systems, with the aim of minimizing the distance between the user and the information he/she is seeking.

The material equivalent would be a scenario in which a customer walks into a store and is immediately handed the exact product he/she originally intended to buy. If the product is not, in fact, what he/she is looking for, the customer should be provided a clear and attractive menu which will allow him/her to quickly and easily find what he/she originally desired.

IF your store does not have what the consumer was looking for, this should be taken as an indicator of one of two possibilities:

1) one should adjust the external architecture of the site such that users seeking this information will not find your website by mistake, wasting valuable time and resources of all parties involved.
2) one should consider expanding the available inventory of the website to include the information sought, and build additional pathways for the users seeking this information.

InformationarchiTECH brings years of experience helping business owners answer these questions to bear upon every web project we choose to embark upon.  If you are unsure whether the target audience is finding your site, or whether your website is servicing the traffic that is, simply contact us for a free consultation. 

Although a website is a completely abstract entity, it follows many of the principles of material reality. Namely, a website performs best in the outside world if it is able to "hold together" according to its own internal structure. This is a simplified way of explaining the importance of a "tightly-knit" link structure for your website.

Designed properly, a user on your website should, from any page, be able to find any other page on your website in two clicks or less. If your website contains information on a relatively wide range of topics, however, the user should have easiest access to other pages on the site related to the type of information he/she is currently investigating.

The simplest link structure is a hierarchical one. In other words, the deeper you drill down into the larger category structure of a site, the more links you are presented with, which direct explicitly to the type of informaion you are seeking.

Another way to create a link structure is relational in nature. Rather than adhering to a strictly hierarchical structure, a relational structure contains links on every page which are loosely associated with the topic of the page in question. Relational link structures are more fluid in nature, and consequently, more difficult to actualize.

The simplest and least effective technique is the "global link structure." In the extreme case, every page would be exactly the same except for the shifting content. Headers, left/right nav bars, and footers remain the same, linking to the same global categories no matter where you are in the site's architecture.

Getting the perfect link structure for your website is a difficult, though highly desirable goal.  If you would like assistance in building a well structured site, or feel that your current one needs improvement, contact informationarchiTECH for a free consultation.

"Local navigation" is a broad concept which includes everything a person can use to find the product, service of piece of knowledge he/she is looking for upon arriving at your site.

The following are the most common elements of local navigation:

Key term search box - Perhaps thanks to the influence of search engines such as Google, a key term search box is quickly becoming the first tool a user turns to upon arriving at a site (assuming that whatever they wanted was not immediately obvious upon their arrival.)

Category search/drilldown - Many users, upon arriving at a site offering a diversity of products, will look for some sort of logical category scheme, much in the same way as a person entering a store will look up for signs designating the different "department" or "aisles."

Header Links - Most sites contain a header with one or more layers of stylized links guiding the user to major sections of the website. Users generally expect to find standard links such as "Contact Us," "About Us," "Links," or a "Site Map" at the top of the page. It is not required, of course, but those diverging from this tradition ought to have a failproof scheme in place for providing the same information.

Home Page - While sometimes not considered in this regard, the home page is actually a vital element in a website's internal navigation. Given current search engine technology, which returns only the most relevant page of any website, it is actually rather unlikely that your home page is the first page a user will find. Many users instinctively look for the home page link, and from there expect to be able to quickly find what they are looking for.

InformationarchiTECH brings years of experience to bear upon the design and development of local navigation for your website.  If you are starting a new website, or simply feel that your current one is not getting the results you hoped for, simply give us a call at 337-706-7460.  Or, request a quote online.

Click here to request a free quote for search engine optimization services for a new or existing website.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting a website to appear as high as possible in the search engine rankings.

There are many companies out there that promise to get your website to appear in the first page of search results "no matter what." The attitude is one of "beating the system," that is, exploying various gimicks in the pusuit of top rankings, whether your site merits the position or not.

In my opinion this attitude is short-sighted, not to mention disingenuous. I believe that sophisticated search engines such as Google are an invaluable public resource, which are made freely available to anyone with Internet access, with the goal of helping users find whatever information they are looking for, whether or not they actually want to buy anything.

This is a hard truth to swallow for anyone wanting to make a quick buck. Those who truly have a passion for what they do, whether it be providing a product, service or knowledge, should not be caught in a dilemma. The ideal for all search engines is that, for any search term, the best, most informative and relevant website, will achieve the top ranking.

InformationarchiTech is not interested in helping you get a passionless, mediocre site to the top rankings through sheer, mechanical reverse-engineering of Google's algorithm. What we intend to do is work with passionate clients who truly believe themselves to possess a unique product, service or piece of information that merits a corresponding rank in the search engine. Whatever it is you have to offer, we will help you write the book that will become the standard for other relevant sites to follow.

InformationarchiTech will get you the #1 ranking, by making your website #1.

Click here to get started.

The following are a few examples of extensive site work I have done, which demonstrate a number of principles I have learned about information architecture in the last few years. Each of these serve as solid "real world" examples of the challenges of information architecture, touching upon the big topics of search engine optimization, category management, internal navigation as well as web content writing. I attempt to give an honest description of each project, describing what I did well, in addition to discussing what I would have done differently given the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

• Antique China Company Case Study

Background In the early Spring of 2003, I answered a job posting at my University for a temporary position unpacking boxes of antique porcelain for possible photographing and posting on a website. At this point I was a recent graduate with a degree in History, and had sent my resume out to dozens of companies with little or no response. I was hired immediately, and began learning of my employer's ambitions to create an online web business based upon the vast inventory he inherited from his mother. I began working with the company he had already hired to build an e-commerce website for him, and my temporary position quickly developed into the full-time one of general manager of an emerging online company. The website company he hired provided all the infrastructure I needed. Everything from an interactive database administration interface to the front-end website template were provided for me. It was up to me to decide upon what sort of category structure made the most sense given the products in the warehouse, and to write relevant content for the site accompanying these categories. It was then that I first learned of the concept of "search engine optimization," and slowly the company began educating me in these techniques as I handled the day-to-day task of building the site according to their instructions. It was with this project that the foundation for my career as an information architect were laid. Category Management The tsnumai of information I encountered upon first being showed the warehouse where the antiques were stored provided me a vertiable meditation in the art of category management. There were literally hundreds of boxes filled with about the same number of distinct patterns of antique china, lined in rows along the concrete floor of this approximately 2000 square foot warehouse. The dinnerware pieces were completely mixed up, meaning that any one box could contain several different patterns. Our first task, then, was to consolidate the hundreds of patterns into distinct boxes. This had to be done manually, as the owners and I wandered about the warehouse with plates and saucers in hand, playing a massive game of 'Memory' as we matched patterns and moved endless stacks of expensive, fragile dinnerware into their proper places. And yet, the dinnerware patterns themselves represented only one level of organization. Other attributes included the types of dinnerware (dinner plate, lunch plate, soup tureen, etc.,) as well as manufacturer (Haviland, Meissen, Dresden, etc.) However, it was not just dinnerware my employers had inherited, but figural scenes as well. These could also be categorized by manufacturer (which sometimes corresponded with dinnerware manufacturers, sometimes not) as well as whether they were a singe "figure" or "figurine," or a "figural scene." Besides all this, there was also a good amount of cut glass and silverware, which we basically ignored. My technical understanding at this time was rather limited, although I have always had a natural ability with computers. (I wrote my first computer program in BASIC at age 7.) What I ultimately decided was to have one category which represented the majority of the total inventory: Haviland dinnerware. And beneath this were a couple of hundred categories named partly according to Haviland's own category scheme, but mostly according to the Schleiger system which I learned was the industry standard for this line of China. I then created separate top level categories, based upon manufacturer and product type. Thus there was a top category for Meissen Dinnerware, as well as categories for Meissen Figurines and Meissen Figural Scenes. The same was true for Dresden and "Dresden-style" manufacturers. Admittedly, the scheme I ultimately decided upon was not perfect, but it was the best I could do given my level of technological understanding at that time. Combined with the search engine optimization of the site, however, the products were ultimately very easy to find and I do not recall very many calls where a user could not find what he/she was looking for, if in fact it existed on the site. Search Engine Optimization From the very beginning, the search term we were targeting was "antique china,"which was sought by search engine users hundreds of times each day. I spent most of my time, however, researching and writing copy on each of the manufacturers represented in our inventory. Each day I brought home books that had also been passed down to my employers from the original proprietor, and wrote extensive histories of the different manufacturers as well as some general history of the discovery of porcelain in Europe. After writing histories of all the manufacturers, I set about writing product descriptions for all of the products we had uploaded to the site. (Of course, I also spent a good deal of time photographing these products and determining pricing, which are other topics altogether.) Soon we were getting calls about our china, and we were gaining the attention of other websites which were happy to link to us. Looking at our webstats, I watched the traffic grow from a handful to a hundred a day, then to hundreds a day. Finally, after only a few months, we hit one thousand unique visitors in a single day. It was around this time that I came to work one day to find my boss in a fury of excitement. "We're #1 in Yahoo for 'antique china!'" he told me. And sure enough we were. He had a huge blowup of the results page printed and mounted on his wall. (We soon gained a #1 ranking with Google as well, and I have only recently fully understood why we attained this ranking with Yahoo first.) Conclusion Needless to say, this was an exciting and largely successful attempt at information architecture, though at the time I did not even know such a term existed. What I lacked, however, was a strong technical understanding of the technology we were borrowing from the web design company; specifically ASP and SQL. Afraid to touch the code, much less the database calls and procedures, I was left with the standard interface they provided all of their clients, and the few minor adjustments I was able to convince them to make. Were I to do it over again, I would do a good number of things differently. The most significant difference, however, would be the manner in which I categorized the products. It is my belief that static category structures, if they must exist at all, should be based upon a single, irreducible attribute. In this case, I would have probably chosen "type." "Tea cup," "soup bowl," and even "figurine" or "candleabra" would be product types. Every other attribute such as "manufacturer" or "pattern name" would be entered at the product level. Had we chosen to fully incorporate the glass and silver merchandise, an additional attribute of "material" could have been used. The value of such a scheme is that it would have given maximum flexibility to the user based upon what he/she actually knew about his/her own wants or needs. This is important for all types of products, but in the case of antique china it was particularly cogent. While some people knew they wanted a dinner plate by Haviland in the Schleiger 322 pattern, there were others that just knew they wanted a pretty cup and saucer for their curio cabinet. A fluid scheme that made use of dynamic "virtual categories" would have been extremely helpful for this website.

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of getting your website to appear in the top rankings of search engine results for relevant search terms.

If you had a website that sold antique china, then “antique china” would probably be a targeted search term for your type of business. If your website was search engine optimized, then, your website would appear at least in the top 10 results whenever “antique china” or a related term was entered into Google's search box.

(Note: by results I mean the natural results provided by the search engine, according to it's own ranking algorithm. I do not mean the “sponsored links,” whose positions are purchased directly just like one might purchase a billboard along a certain highway.)

How does this happen? There are at least four major factors that determine where your website will appear in the search engine results.

• Web Content Writing
• Key term selection, density & page structure
  
• Site architecture, information & link structure
  
• Inbound Links (the quantity and quality of other websites that link to yours.)

One major entry point through which I began learning the craft of SEO (search engine optimization) was the field of web content writing.

Web content writing is more or less a synonym for online copywriting. “Web content” refers to all of the text that appears on your website, whether informational, descriptive or persuasive in nature. In terms of SEO, however, web content writing has one important, additional feature. Namely, web content is optimized.

Web content is the single most important factor in ensuring that your website will achieve the highest rankings in search engine results for relevant key phrases. The more competitive the key phrase, the more web content writing you will need. Most search engines ascribe significant “weight” to the sheer volume of information a website contains. In addition, good web content writing will be infused with a strategic key word density. This is the optimal number of times a search term should appear in your page in proportion to the total number of words. Use a phrase too few times and the search engines will give you a low ranking; use a phrase too many times and you will be penalized as a "spammer."

In order to make the most of your web content writing, it is a good idea to run a full analysis of highly-searched phrases which relate directly to your products, services or information. The most popular phrases should be targeted first, followed by the secondary and tertiary search phrases. (For more information about key term selection, click here.)

In an ideal situation, you would have at least one page of content on your site for every possible relevant phrase a person could enter into the search engine. In the real world, of course, you will have to make decisions according to your immediate needs and available resources. While gaining high search engine rankings through the use of web content writing is important, it would be a mistake to view this as the only purpose the content should serve. Once again, getting a potential client or other member of your target audience to your site is important. But once that person finds you, it is important to consider how the web content writing (which will then be read by a human, not a search engine) will translate into action on the part of the user.

“Action” may mean the purchase of a product, a request for services, or a change in attitude; whatever it is your web site is trying to accomplish. If you have a need for good web content writing for your site, informationarchiTECH can help. We will work closely with you to determine exactly what needs to be communicated to your audience, and do it in such a way that your website will become more “findable” in the search engine results.

We have written content for a wide range of clients, including retail, educational & service oriented companies. (See Examples.)

Click here to request web content writing services.

The current development of search technology is demonstrating a much greater awareness of intelligence and meaning in information than we have had before. As chaos theory has taught us, the multiplication of virtually (and perhaps literally) any set of data along enough iterations will render certain patterns visible, and there are even patterns to the patterns.

What the algorithm developers at Google are only beginning to understand is that certain sets of rules can effectively lead users through the pathways of these basically natural patterns, which are discovered best by observation, experience and long thought. In so doing, they have developed a search technology that is so effective that it manages to help billions of users sort through the single largest collection of data in human history without the use of category, hierarchy, geography, or chronology.

These are, by the way, the five techniques posed by Richard Wurman as the principle means by which humans order information (the other was alphabetization, which to me seems fundamentally the same as chronology... what I call 'chronology' was separated by Wurman into “time” and “alphabetization.”)

But of these techniques, where does Google fall? Clearly, none of these terms even come close to describing what Google does.

How might one describe Google's technique? Matching? A variable weighting system? A highly accelarated system of trial and error? It is difficult to classify for the same reason, I would venture to guess, that Wurman did not think to include it. The fact is, what Google is doing is a very new thing, because it is operating in an environment with which we still have little experience. Put simply, the dynamic rather than the static.

Of all of the techniques mentioned by Wurman all but “time” are basically static in human terms, and this only because time itself is always in motion. Categories have traditionally sliced through data, whereas Google literally “crawls” its way around it. The data is completely without a static state. It has no structure to speak of. No doubt the pages indexed by Google are entered into their own database in some kind of chronological order, but this is at most a key field, basically an index of the physical location of the data on the hardware. As far as any user is concerned, all of the pages are laid out at random, as all of the pages of a thousand encyclopedias placed upon a surface as large as the moon.

What is returned, after entering any term of their spontaneous choosing into a blank search box, is a work of magic—a rabbit pulled from a hat. It is based upon the idea of letting the information order itself. Information is, after all, a product of human intelligence. This means that the seed of intelligence is contained within all information. Intelligence is dynamic, and so should be the pathways used to find the information it generates.

While Google has delievered incredible “results” in a couple of senses, I believe the technique will reach its upper limit fairly soon. They can only keep modifying the search algorithm so long. As information continues to explode (many new sites created every day, very few deleted) so will Google's infrastructure begin to experience stress. It will need to find another way to break the information down. But moving only forward! Attempts to slice the information up again into static divisions declared from above will fail, if they are ever made. They will either be too broad to have any meaning, or so narrow as to accelarate a “stupidification” process.

There is order to the information that is more than just pulling a new rabbit out of the same hat every time. But the nature of that order changes for every person on every day. There are categories, hierarchies, geographies and chronologies which make perfect sense for most all of the data indexed by Google. But they will never be the same for every person. I believe Google will (and if they do not, some one else will) find a clean method by which to combine categorization with dynamic search results. But the categories will be dynamic, not static. They will not simply change according to the needs of a given situation—the situation itself will create them.

Categories will appear in the the same way that pages currently appear—on the fly, as though pulled out of a hat. But unlike a page result—which is basically an endpoint, and either is or is not what you were looking for—the dynamic, or virtual categories will be forks in the road. They will appear depending upon the general direction you are headed, as well as what surrounds you at a given point in time. (always up to date) Most importantly, they will be circular rather hierarchical. They will be true pathways, making a full circle possible.

Keeping the previous structure intact is an vital commitment for information architects. Moving forward is required for success, but maintaining continuity with the past is essential to maintaining balance. This concept is rather broad, but can be illustrated in a few examples.

Imagine, for example, you have a website which sells hundreds of products that are poorly organized. Let us say you sell books. You have a category for "Romance," another for "Renaissance Literature," another for "Robert Louis Stevenson," and yet another for "Hardbacks." What is wrong with this picture?

Bascially, the main issue here is that a static category structure (if one must be used at all) should remain as simple as possible. Specifically, any category structure must be centered about one and only one attribute. Described above are category names which reference four different types of attributes: Genre, Time, Author, Hardback/Paperback.

The short solution is to reduce the category scheme to one attribute, and then delegate the remaining category attributes to the product level. In other words, if Genre was decided upon as the key attribute, and it was decided that an edition of Remembrance of Things Past should be placed into it, certain field values would be associated with this product to compensate for the lost categories. Time=19th century, Author= Marcel Proust, Cover=Hardback, etc.

From this point, with some basic coding, the user should be able to "drill down" to the exact, desired product will little effort, only by knowing beforehand the genre he/she desired.

How then, do we implement a new, more intelligent structure, while keeping the previous structure intact? There are a number of techniques involved here. But you can first be sure that any old urls used in your site (for example, if your site has high ranking pages indexed in the search engines, or links from other high traffic web sites) will remain active following the transition. The goal is not to kill the old urls immediately, but to phase them out gradually, at a natural pace, as the new structure takes effect.

In order to learn more about how Informationarchitech can clean up your website categories, while keeping the previous structure intact, click here to request a free consultation.

Every body of knowledge is unique, and contains its own set of rules, behaviors and shifting priorities. This is where my creative side comes into play. I become a student of the subject matter I am hired to order. I strive to understand the internal consistency, the intelligence that exists already in any complex system, organic or artificial. It is only by understanding this existant logical structure that I may begin to construct an accurate map, a blueprint, if you will, upon which the particular appearance and character of your website will be applied.